1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hardware performance simulators and, more particularly, to a method for graphically tracking instructions being examined by hardware performance simulators.
2. Description of the Related Art
A performance simulator is a computer program that simulates electronic hardware components to assist an engineer in designing hardware components. The performance simulator can simulate or model hardware components much faster than building and coding actual hardware components. As a result, the performance simulator often serves as a starting point for development of new hardware.
The performance simulator is a powerful tool that allows the engineer to quickly explore the applicability of various hardware designs, to check for design errors, to analyze designs, and to determine performance tradeoffs. In order to check for errors, i.e., debugging, in either the performance simulator itself or the hardware design, the engineer needs to know the internal operation of the individual components in the hardware (and performance simulator) and how they interact. For example, the engineer designs a microprocessor chip architecture that should take three clock cycles to execute a floating point instruction. However, the performance simulator may erroneously indicate that the proposed architecture is taking four cycles. One way the engineer can check whether the error originated from the performance simulator or from the hardware design is to trace the progression of instructions executing through the simulated hardware components in the performance simulator.
As shown in FIG. 1, a prior art approach uses simple diagrams with American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text descriptions to show the progression of instructions within the performance simulator. One disadvantage with the prior art diagram is that the textual descriptions are difficult to read. In other words, the engineer must have a thorough knowledge of the hardware design to understand the textual descriptions. Furthermore, the prior art diagram can display only limited textual information. For example, if the textual descriptions for the instructions are long, the prior art diagram must reduce the number of instructions displayed in order to accommodate the long textual descriptions on a display screen. Finally, the prior art diagram is not interactive and the engineer cannot obtain more information than what is displayed on the display screen.
As a result, there is a need for a method for displaying and tracking the progression of instructions within the performance simulator that the engineer can easily understand and providing an interactive display that can accommodate more information.